The Best American Magazine Writing 2011 • edited by Sid Holt

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This collection of articles and stories is made up of finalists and award-winners of the National Magazine Awards, sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The pieces were all published in 2010, and a few of them are a bit dated, but most have stood the test of time with no diminution and are well worth a read today.

award-winning pieces of magazine writing

From the Virginia Quarterly Review, there’s an original, masterful fictional short story by Paul Theroux, “Minor White”, about a rich art collector, his experiments with a kind of murder, and his comeuppance.

Three columns about being mortally sick with cancer, written by famed atheist Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair, are included in this collection:

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as I were actually shackled to my own corpse.

Hitchens writes about oncology, chemo, the reactions of religious people to news of his cancer, and about cancer etiquette:

As the populations of Tumortown and Wellville continue to swell and to “interact,” there’s a growing need for ground rules that prevent us from inflicting ourselves upon one another.

Pamela Colloff’s 14,000 word article from Texas Monthly, “Innocence Lost”, tells the story of Anthony Graves’ arrest, trial, and imprisonment — for a murder he didn’t commit — and was instrumental in getting him released from prison after 18 years. The accompanying article, “Innocence Found”, tells the story of his exoneration.

In “Letting Go”, an article that appeared in the New Yorker, winner of the public interest award, surgeon Atul Bawande explores the question of when we should die — whether it makes sense to prolong life no matter what, against all hope. She shares the story of a young mother battling a deadly disease and also a visit with a hospice nurse making the rounds of dying patients’ homes. Here she describes a dilemma she faces in her medical practice:

She was unmarried and without children. So I saw with her sisters in the ICU family room to talk about whether we should proceed with the amputation and the tracheotomy. “Is she dying?” one of the sisters asked me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t even sure what the word “dying” meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science had rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

There are two dozen award-winning pieces of magazine writing in this collection, from “Water Is Life” to “I Want My Prostate Back”, from “My Bra’s Too Tight” to the “Guantánamo ‘Suicides'” — something for everybody who appreciates world-class writing on compelling topics.